Romance and Prejudice on SPN
Saw one of those ‘If Cas had a female vessel Destiel would have become canon years ago’. Normally I’d just shake my head and move on. But this time I decided to actually explain why this sort of thing makes me want to shake my head. Because we need more than just one type of meta in this fandom.
A female vessel for Cas wouldn’t automatically translate into a Dean/Cas romance, because it’s not that simple.
Anti-queer prejudice is a huge problem in cinema and TV, no question about that. Even nowadys queer sex and/or relationships are only allowed on screen if relevant to the plot. The same kind of constraint obviously doesn’t apply to m/f sex and/or relationships.
But - it’s not the only prejudice cinema and TV are (still) struggling with. Another huge issue is the representation of women and the constraint placed on them depending on their function within the narrative and their relationships to the male protagonists.
SPN generally differentiates two types of female characters: female characters who are more or less self-sufficient and are relevant to the plot or even have their own storyline - and love interests. Now, logically, one might expect the showrunners to wait and see if two characters on the show develop chemistry before deciding to pair them up, but that’s not how it works. Unfortunately.
So while Dean and Donna or Sam and Jody might have great chemistry, nothing is ever going to come of it, because they were never intended to be Sam or Dean’s love interests in the first place.
Which is why all the people who were up in arms after the Girls Girls Girls trailer and sent hatemail to Berens should have just taken a deep breath and reminded themselves that Hannah was never introduced as a love interest. So any romance between her and Cas would always be restricted to other people mistaking them for a couple or the two of them pretending to be one. You know, just like it is with Sam and Dean. Or Dean and Cas.
But what about Ruby, you might ask. She was involved in the show for a whole year before she became Sam’s love interest.
Except that Ruby only proves my point: The character was re-introduced with a new actress and a complete character make-over the moment she and Sam became an item. (We’ll just ignore for now how once she crossed over into love interest territory she became softer, sweeter and generally much more feminine.)
The only character I can think of where this doesn’t apply is Meg. Her romance with Cas clearly wasn’t planned, and was the result of Rachel Miner’s stunning performance alone. She introduced a new level of depth and charisma to the character and managed to create one of the most romantic scenes on the show in an episode where she only existed as a plot device for Cas.
Of course, the pairing was only confirmed in canon the moment it became irrelevant, but I’m just going to pretend that if Rachel Miner hadn’t been sick that wouldn’t have been the last chapter of the Megstiel relationship.
The black and white “love interest” vs. “real character”* mentality isn’t the only hurdle female characters on the show have to jump before being allowed to enter a relationship with the male protagonist. They also have to conform to the CW’s idea of what makes an acceptable mate for a thirty-something male hero: attractive, slim, and significantly younger.
Dean/Donna can’t happen not only because Donna wasn’t cast as a love interest, but because she is too fat by TV standards, and too old. Jody or Rowena are likewise both considered too old for Sam.
Accordingly, they’re mom-zoned and thrown at other, older male partners. Which is more than a little ridiculous. Kim Rhodes is closer to Jared in age than to Jim Beaver, for instance, yet within TVland she’s a more acceptable companion for Bobby than Sam.
The frankly horrifying hookup of Rowena and Gabriel last season seemed to exist solely to rub it in that no matter how much Sam and Rowena had bonded over their mutual Lucifer trauma and how Rowena had failed to kill Sam because she cared too much about him they would never, ever become a couple and anyone hoping for such a thing was mental. A message that this season’s scene of Rowena and Sam pretending to be a couple only repeated.
Whenever the show jokes about the idea of two characters being a couple, no matter whether it’s two men, two women or a man and a woman, that usually serves both the function of baiting fans of said pairing as well as putting them down. Though a lot of fans tend to be unaware of the latter.
The ‘What if’ jokes also illustrate quite beautifully how the show’s genre places further constraints on possible romances on the show - as a Gothic horror (or lately more of a fantasy) narrative romance on SPN is very serious business, often deadly serious, no joking allowed. And whenever SPN does try to handle romances with humour the end result is usually pretty disturbing. Just think of Season 7, Time for a Wedding!
So where does all of that leave us? While we can never know for sure it’s extremely likely that even if Cas had been introduced in a female vessel (and said vessel had been around the same age as Misha) and she and Dean had had the most sizzling subtextual tension on screen imaginable it still wouldn’t have resulted in a canon relationship.
* Evidently, even female characters who’re introduced can be well-rounded characters (such as Sarah or Jamie); and female characters who’re there strictly for the plot can still be utterly one-dimensional (poor Kelly Kline, anyone?).
